Video surveillance systems are increasingly deployed within public and private institutions, such as households, commercial buildings, businesses, retail establishments, schools, hospitals and government buildings, to list a few examples. These surveillance systems are often used for a number of different tasks, such as intelligence gathering by governments and businesses, prevention or investigation of crime by law enforcement or retail establishments, and monitoring the usage of resources or structures such as buildings, bridges or roads, to list a few examples.
A number of components are common to many of these video surveillance systems. Surveillance cameras capture image data that are typically then sent over one or more data networks, such as governmental, service provider, enterprise or home networks. This image data are typically stored on network video recorders (NVRs). Video analytics systems are often included to analyze the image data. Finally, control systems are often used to control the surveillance systems and coordinate the operation of the components.
These video analytics systems have the capability of automatically analyzing image data to detect and determine temporal and spatial events. Minimally, these systems track objects against fixed background scenes. More sophisticated functions include object detection to determine the presence of an object or a type of object. Even higher level functions include object analysis, such as object identification.
The methods employed by video analytics systems for detecting and analyzing classes of objects in image data have become more accurate in recent years, and are, as a consequence, becoming more and more important in video surveillance systems. Two common examples of object analysis within image data are facial recognition of individuals and license plate recognition, or number plate recognition. Some of these video analytics systems are sophisticated enough to identify a particular person from their facial characteristics, and can identify a particular license plate by reading and recognizing the text and numbers within the license plate, in examples.